Rahul Varma is a global Human Resources leader, speaker and thought leader whose career has been dedicated to helping people thrive at work and make a positive impact on businesses and society. He is the co-founder of Samuh, a company focused on creating conditions for sustained high performance in organizations, and a board member of Sapien Labs, a neuroscience based organization with the largest database of mind health in the world. Previously, Rahul was the global Chief HR Officer for Accenture Technology, leading HR for Accenture’s largest business that employed over 375,000 people. Throughout his career, Rahul has led large, globally distributed workforces and complex organization transformations. From India to Singapore to New York he held various roles at Accenture including Global Head of Talent, Chief Learning Officer, Global Head of HR Strategy and Head of HR, India. During this journey, he crafted a new approach to leadership development, implemented an AI based solution to measuring skills, helped launch and integrate Accenture’s platform business, led the largest scale successful re-imagination of performance management in the world and created multiple innovations in digital learning and global learning centers. As the first HR Director in India, Rahul led through a phase of dramatic growth as Accenture grew from 200 people to almost 40,000 in seven years.

Rahul’s work has received wide recognition including as a two-time recipient of the First-Place CLO Learning Elite Award; eight patents in the U.S., Canada, Australia, South Africa, and India; and a Harvard Business School case study on hyper-growth in India. Rahul has served on the boards of Covenant House International, a non-profit dedicated to eradicating youth homelessness and Madura Microfinance, which provided micro-loans in India. He holds a master’s degree in Human Resources from Symbiosis Institute of Business Management (Pune, India), and a bachelor’s degree in Economics from the University of Delhi.